386 • CHAPTER 13 Reasoning and Decision Making
that hospital patients receive the vaccine, because it is easy to justify a decision that
maximizes survival chances for a group of people.
The most important implication of these results may be what it suggests about how
physicians should present choices to their patients. Physicians often feel that they should
simply present the information and let their patients deal with making the decision. But
perhaps physicians should be sensitive to some of the emotional factors facing patients
who are being asked to make decisions about their own treatment. Zikmund-Fisher and
coworkers suggest that physicians should consider asking patients to “reframe” their
decision by thinking about it as if it were a decision they were making for someone else.
The idea behind doing this would be to help the patient gain a better understanding of
the trade-offs they face.- What is the utility approach to decisions? What are some examples of situa-
tions in which people do not behave to maximize the outcome, as the utility
approach proposes? - Distinguish between expected emotions, integral immediate emotions, and
incidental immediate emotions. - What is the connection between risk aversion and people’s ability to predict
their emotions? Describe the Kermer experiment in which participants rated
their expected happiness before gambling and their actual happiness after the
results were known. - What is some evidence that incidental emotions affect decisions? Consider the
relationship between the weather and university admissions, and Lerner’s experi-
ment on the relationship between mood and setting buying and selling prices. - How do the way choices are presented and the need to justify decisions affect
the decisions people make? - How is the prefrontal cortex involved in problem solving and reasoning?
- What is neuroeconomics? Describe Sanfey and coworkers’ (2003) experiment,
and indicate what it adds to our understanding of decision making. - How are people’s decisions about treatment options infl uenced by the person
or group for whom they are making the decision?
CHAPTER SUMMARY
TEST YOURSELF 13.3
- Reasoning is a cognitive process in which people start
with information and come to conclusions that go
beyond that information. Deductive reasoning involves
syllogisms and can result in definite conclusions.
Inductive reasoning is based on evidence and results in
conclusions that are probably true. - Categorical syllogisms have two premises and a conclu-
sion that describe the relation between two categories by
using statements that begin with all, no, or some. - A syllogism is valid if its conclusion follows logically from
its premises. The validity of a syllogism is determined by
its form. This is different from truth, which is determined
by the content of the statements in the syllogism and has
to do with how statements correspond to known facts. - Conditional syllogisms have two premises and a conclu-
sion, like categorical syllogisms, but the first premise has
the form “If... then.. ..” The four basic types of condi-
tional syllogism are (a) affirming the antecedent and
(b) denying the consequent (both valid); (c) affirming the
consequent and (d) denying the antecedent (both invalid).- The Wason four-card problem has been used to study
how people think when evaluating conditional syllo-
gisms. People make errors in the abstract version, but
perform better when the problem is stated in real-world
terms, as in the “drinking age” version. The key to solv-
ing the problem is to apply the falsification principle. - Based on experiments using different versions of the Wason
problem, a number of mechanisms have been proposed to
explain people’s performance. These mechanisms include
using permission schemas, and the evolutionary approach,
which explains performance in terms of social exchange
theory. Many experiments have provided evidence for and
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